What kind of bomb is this?

[Jimbrowski]

In the past day or two, BBC News reported that the U.S. was using a very, very large bomb in Afghanistan. It was so big & heavy it is carried to the target in a (modified) transport aircraft, the "back door" (please excuse the technical jargon) of the plane is lowered, a small drogue chute yanks the thing out, then a larger chute deploys to slow its descent. They made the point of saying it had to descend slowly to give the plane time to get out of the way.

It's not the long & thin "bunker buster" bombs discussed earlier on this board.

What weapon is this? Specs, anyone? Pics?

I checked the BBC website but no luck. I also found http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/weapons/ but couldn't find what the BBC was talking about.

[KarlGauss]

This is the Blu-82 which weighs about 15000 lbs, 80% of which is explosive.

[micco]

The Blu-82 is also called the "daisy cutter".
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/ret...erd/index.html

[Reverend]

little information and 3 photos of "daisy cutters" in action in Vietnam
http://hometown.aol.com/old16inf/CAS.html

[Andy]

That's what you call getting a lot of bang for you bucks...at less than $30000 each

[UncleBill]

I was in my HMMWV at the 2nd Marine Division HQ in Saudi Arabia, in our "lawdown" position about six miles from the Kuwaiti border when one of the puppies was dropped about two days before the full-scale ground war began (Feb 26 or so, 1991). I was lucky enough to be on a field phone (T/A-32?) patch through God knows where talking to my girlfriend in NC when it went boom. I knew it was coming, the DASC (or Direct Air Support Center) was right next to us, they had the best coffee. Even though I was maybe 8 miles away, the HMMWV was rocked, and my girlfriend, through thousands of miles of static, exclaimed "What the hell was THAT?" I had to tell her it was our guys, not incoming.

[World Eater]

I read of an incident in the gulf war where a "big Blue" 82 was mistaken for a nuke by some british commandos on the ground. All that for $27,000 Bucks!

[The Scrivener]

FWIW, NPR [Nat. Public Radio] did a story on the "daisy cutters" too, 11/6 (evening broadcast), although I did a search on their site and couldn't find the piece.

In spite of the CNN report, in which they were described as military and not psychological, from what I've read & heard elsewhere their intended purpose is almost as much psychological as it is military, per se. Extremely INTIMIDATING weapons, and those they don't kill may be moved to defect or go AWOL (or so we hope). It looks like we're not going to be jeopardizing ground troops en masse until we've made as many kills/defectors/deserters as possible, through bombardment, and wisely so...

Having said that, anything that pulverizes everything within a radius of 600 yards (when precisely detonated at a height of three feet above the ground, as these are) is a helluva weapon. The Taliban deserve nothing less than our best!

[tsunamisurfer]

HIJACK

According to the link above:

"The BLU-82 is a 15,000 pound GP bomb originally designed to clear helicopter landing zones in Vietnam. The warhead contains 12,600 pounds of GSX slurry and is detonated just above ground level by a 38-inch fuze extender."

Okay, the warhead contains GSX slurry. (Whatever.) How would that compare to the explosive potential of, say, 12,600 pounds of Semtex or C-5?

How much more explosive is C-5?

(sorry for the hijack Jibrowski. Good OP)

[Tranquilis]

In general, Fuel-Air Explosives and Slurry Explosives are far more effective than conventional explosives, even if the "conventional" explosive is a solid form of the same explosive from which the slurry is made.

I'll have to dig about and see if I can find propagation rates and pressures yielded by the BLU-82.

[Milton De La Warre]

Sorry I don't have a cite right here, but I hear that a reason for the effectiveness of the FAE type bombs such as the one described there is that the mixture distributes and then detonates in such a way as to get the best effect from the pressure force of the explosion. As I recall, this can exceed the overpressure produced by a nuclear weapon in the immediate target area.

Tranquilis therefore has it right in saying that FAE type weapons are more effective than regular bombs with the same secret sauce filling... it's not the explosive, it's how it's "applied" to the target.

The way it was once explained to me is that a regular bomb explodes in something like a spherical shape, distributing the energy all around. These bombs referred to in this post focus the force downwards, in a kind of plate shape.

The Federation of American Scientists site has a nice 4-frame sequence of an FAE type weapon dispersing its mixture and then detonating.

[Una Persson]

USA Today reported yesterday that the BLU-82 was used for psychological effect in the Gulf War at least once. They reported that one was dropped near an Iraqi battalion, and then leaflets were dropped warning that the battalion was going to be directly targeted by the next one(s). They reported the entire battalion surrendered at once.

[TwistofFate]

how explosive is GMX-Slurry?

They provide more Blast for your buck, or at least, more effective blast.


For all the grizzly details, the links below are very good.

Here is a good link that talks about Slurry Explosive http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/02/chech0215b.htm#N_4_
and how they work.

and a discussion of Slurry bombs effectiveness against C$ is here
http://yarchive.net/explosives/slurry.html

[thinksnow]

Over in IMHO last week we were discussing this very weapon...kinda. No more flamethrowers?.

me in that thread
FAE = Fuel-Air Explosive.

Other sites:[*]Slow loading movie/gif[*]this one describe the Russians using what they describe as a vacuum bomb

I had heard a story, while in the Marines, that people found following the use of an FAE, were laying there on the groud with their lungs turned inside out, literally sucked out of them. Yummy.

Psycological impact, indeed.